Kathryn no longer knows what to make of the black-eyed girl risen from her bier, now that she is a sentient, blinking being, rather than a fresh-kept corpse. She is unsettled by the appetite with which the black-eyed girl watches the women, her undisguised hunger. Kathryn has spied the girl kneeling before the old corpse of a roebuck, her fingers tearing into its stiff body, raising the rotted flesh to her lips. The first death in the forest in centuries. Now Kathryn finds herself jumping at the crackle of a pine cone, the echo of a wood thrush, the scrape of a penknife against twigs. Will it be now? Has the black-eyed girl come for her? The wait is torturous.
She tries to focus her attention instead on those traveling the forest, the other breed of unlike body to consider, within and yet still so far from her reach. It feels to Kathryn like centuries since midsummer, although Lucy tells her it was just the other day that the wood opened, that Kathryn had her dalliance with that young man from the town. Kathryn had hoped that the awakening of the girl would mean a difference, that the wood would let her lovers stay longer, enter more often. Kathryn has been disappointed with the black-eyed girl’s slow stalking of the forest creatures, her apparent disdain for Kathryn’s needs. If she can open the wood on a whim, why not use it to all of their advantages?
This is not to say that Kathryn does not respect the black-eyed girl. She does. Hers is a boundless respect born of fear. She tries to work up her courage to ask the girl for favors, to start a simple conversation, but the uncanny darkness of those eyes, the languid movements . . . Each time Kathryn gathers her courage, she imagines the girl hissing at her. She imagines her own body torn open, the black-eyed girl fingering her unbound muscles, tasting her blood.
SHE GOES WITH Lucy to gather a bouquet of bluebell and honeysuckle to lay at the black-eyed girl’s altar. As she stoops to pluck a flower, Kathryn feels someone moving in the other wood beside them, kneeling where she kneels. Mumbling. Praying. A man.
“I can see him,” Kathryn says. Though still shut, the veil has been thinner since its recent midsummer opening, in a way it never has been before. Kathryn hears movement, smells cologne, catches sight of shadowy profiles. “I can feel him.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Lucy.
“Perhaps if you were to ask the girl to bring him inside . . .”
“Contain yourself,” says Lucy. “He’s clearly trying to come in. As if he thinks he’s owed entrance. I know of men like that. He isn’t worth the risk.”
“But she let the other’s father—”
“That was different.”
A rush of air sputters through Kathryn’s lips. “Imagine,” she says, “the wind screaming. Imagine the scrape of his boots. I wonder if it has snowed. I wonder if the snow has melted.”
“Silliness,” says Lucy. “Besides, it is summer, remember?”
Kathryn sighs again, brimming with desire. She turns and leaves Lucy. She thinks of the dark-haired boy with blue eyes, lithe and muscular. The boy she’s seen before, a shadow slipping through Urizon. He’d peered in through a back window, sweating through his white collared shirt, and Kathryn could see the ripple of his biceps, could easily imagine the rest of his lean body underneath.
She pictures him now, and tries to reach for him with her mind, following his scent. When she inhales, an overwhelming new odor arrests her. Bullfrogs sing mating songs, trees shiver in the breeze. Kathryn inhales again and stops, looking down at her clogs, which are grimy with age, but still boast small patches of their original color. They are sinking into new-formed mud, a rich red stew of sticky earth. Kathryn kneels, sinking her hands into foreign soil. When she lifts them, her fingers are stained red with blood.